Thursday, 9 July 2015

I'm still very constrained by real life here in Puddlecote Towers and Puddlecote Inc, but I just had to find some time to report some great news from the usually madcap state of California.

State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) dropped a bill Wednesday that would have regulated electronic cigarettes after it was gutted by an Assembly panel to no longer treat vaping devises as tobacco products facing the same restrictions as cigarettes.

Senator Leno is a ridiculous pillock - allegedly funded by pharmaceutical interests - who knows the princely sum of fuck all about e-cigs, as we can surmise from his inept and hilarious pre-vote gobshitery.

E-cigarettes are tobacco products, and #SB140 ensures they fall under California's existing and effective smoke-free laws.

He seemed to think that just repeating the phrase "e-cigarettes are tobacco products" would drive his fellow legislators to crap themselves and vote for an unnecessary, and entirely idiotic, ban on their use in public. E-cigs are not tobacco products for the, some would say obvious, fact that they don't contain any tobacco and are mostly not made by tobacco companies. It's quite a big clue.
He also makes a big noise about Philip Morris launching an "e-cig with real tobacco". The reality that it isn't actually an e-cig - but instead a device unashamedly heating tobacco not burning it and therefore a tobacco product not an e-cig - appears to have escaped his limited intellect.

The bill (SB140) being scrapped and Leno making an arse of himself is great news in itself, but the composition of those who stuck the knife in his back is quite telling.

Five Democrats voted with Republicans for the amendment, which was sought by the electronic cigarette industry.

As in the UK, the left - Democrats there and Labour here - tend to offer most opposition to vaping, arguably on the grounds of ignorance and incredibly lazy research (if they have bothered to do any at all). So Democrats shifting their view and siding with the angels is something of a surprise, maybe even an indication that times really are a'changing.

In the case of SB140, at a public meeting in April, over a hundred vapers lined up to publicly and personally object to Leno's madness while Mad Stan Glantz sat at Leno's side spouting his usual data-twisting bullshit. The people won, and a stupid politician advised by a self-serving and increasingly barking aircraft engineer lost. Badly. There can surely be no better result than that.

If the level of public support for e-cigs and harm reduction is starting to spook Democrats in the US, the dinosaurs of tobacco control who still push anti-vaping messages - despite overwhelming evidence going against them - will be rightfully marginalised even further as fundamentally untrustworthy cranks.

We've already seen evidence that high profile figures in the UK Labour party are beginning to understand that sections of the tobacco control industry have been lying to them, with Luciana Berger recently tweeting about the stupidity of Mark Drakeford's Labour-led ban in Wales. And quite right too, no-one except the most vile in society are that bothered about e-cigs, so any ban is unjust, unjustified and counter to every item of rhetoric an anti-smoking politician has ever uttered in the past. Plus, only the most vacant MP can ignore the unusually large volume of correspondence they receive from personally motivated vaping consumers and their friends and family. At the end of the day, politicians need votes, which I think California's Democrats have started to realise.

Leno's defeat should set alarm bells ringing in many jurisdictions over the issue of e-cigs. Most especially in Wales where Drakeford will hopefully soon be forced into a similar climbdown, as his pathetically blind bigotry and lack of political foresight transforms into humiliating embarrassment and an entry in the footnotes of political history as a crashing failure.

But for now, let's toast the vapers of California whose determination has seen off Leno's nonsense and sent a message around the world that, you know, e-cigs are really not tobacco products and politicians would do well to leave them alone if they value their careers.

On a side note, SB151 which would have raised the age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21 was also binned (perhaps influenced by an editorial in the LA Times). California politicians caring about personal adult choices? Whatever next!

5 comments:

Tom
said...

Mark Leno is radical gay, from San Francisco and when he was on the Board of Stupidvisors for City/County of San Francisco, promoted and backed a lot of tobacco retail bans and smoke bans, indoors and out, was always anti-tobacco, as were ALL the SF Stupidvisors (and still are to this day, with Stanton Glantz to back them up).

So, if he could not get this passed under CA State Law, he will still more than likely refer this back to his radical leftist anti-smoking buddies back in SF along with Stanton Glantz and make damn sure a similar ban is passed for all of San Francisco.

It's quite possible, given their tactics, they will make it illegal to vape outdoors in SF in city owned parks, squares, plazas, parklettes and sidewalks or face the rath of a maximum $500 fine for such "crime", which is how it is with current anti-tobacco laws and outdoor bans for that city.

He may end up pushing this back down the line to have SF enact it, then they'll call it a "big success", then he will try again for it at state level a year from now. (That would give Stanton Glantz enough time to quickly throw together another "study" and "prove" something.)

They tend to operate that way in NorCal, they're all smoke-haters and from SF they graduate to Sacramento state offices (Brown, Harris, Leno, Newsom, Ammiano, others) 88 miles away, then inflict their same anti-tobacco, anti-vaping laws statewide, is their modus operandi.

Since Mark Leno is proudly gay and happily open and radical about it, fighting for extreme gay rights as his primary concern, perhaps instead of worrying about Stanton Glantz and his quest to ban all vaping everywhere, he'd do better to stick his nose into matters he knows more about.

A slightly longer quip: How can anyone, in their right mind, throw a vote toward these "why caint we jes gitalon... ah why caint we be friends?" Degenerats without recognizing the problems of the "social justice" bullshit within it?

Are Degenerats so hard up for friendship that they'll try to proclaim they're "cleaner" than those wascally Wapethuglicans on the right? And why do my eyes reflexively glance downward at a Degenerat's knees when they're trying to convince me of something which doesn't require further "convincing" outside of the argument itself?

Facts: Hitler was a nonsmoker, a vegan, a painter and a published author (Godwin knows what to kiss),

And people wonder why people don't vote (there are no longer ballots within the United States so it's a moot and obsolete point).